The Wansdyke & District Forums

A small grim one for the collection. There are stones and spots all about the downs with dark names, and the Hangman's Stone is a favourite of mine, because the story is the same wherever you find it, and there are several. A sheep-stealer, walking home in the dark with a stolen sheep tied round his neck by its legs, sits down to rest against a standing stone. The sheep, slung over the stone, struggles, slips, and hangs down the far side, and its weight throttles the thief against the stone, and there the pair of them are found in the morning. The stone is named for it ever after. Pure morality tale, of course, the stolen sheep made the death of the man who took it, you can hear the pulpit in it. But I love that the landscape itself is made to do the hanging, the old stone as judge and gallows both. The downs are full of these little courts.

That is a good one, Annie, and the shape of it, the thief killed by the very thing he stole, is older than Christianity by a long way, though the Church was glad enough to borrow it. The standing stone as judge is the interesting part to me. Long after people had stopped knowing what the stone was for, they knew it was not to be trifled with, and a story like this keeps that respect alive in a form a Christian county could go on telling. Fear the stone, but for a nice safe moral reason. The old dread, smuggled down the centuries in a cautionary tale about sheep.